During your education
at FAU, you may receive an assignment from a professor who instructs you
to use "scholarly," "refereed," or "peer-reviewed"
articles from academic journals, and to stay away from "popular"
ones. "Aren't all articles the same," you ask yourself. Well,
actually there are slight differences.

Scholarly
ArticlesScholarly articles
are sometimes referred to as "research," "academic,"
or "professional" articles. This means that
they are writtenby experts, usually
professors, scholars, or researchers,
in a particular field and then published in scholarly journals. These
authors are often, though not always, affiliated with a university, college,
research institute, or other academic or education center. The articles
themselves usually contain results from research studies, or historical,
theoretical, or critical analyses. The following images are examples of
scholarly journals. (See figure 1.)

The writinglevel is almost always very high with
specialized and/or technicallanguage
and vocabulary within the discipline used extensively. The length
of these articles can be somewhat long, sometimes running
more than ten pages and containing 7,000 words. The average audience of
scholarly articles are other academics and professionals in the field.

Scholarly Periodical
Names
There is a myth that the names of scholarly journals always begin with
"Journal of," but this is not the case. As Figure 1 indicates,
scholarly journals do not follow a set rule when it comes to naming.